The importance of ISO 9001 in manufacturing

Quality control is important for any industry, but for manufacturing it is paramount.

It can win or lose you clients, and open new opportunities or clamp down existing ones within a matter of hours. Plus, when the quality of your product goes down the pan, it spreads like a disease to the rest of the businesses within your supply chain and the cost can be immense…

Did you know…ISO 9001:2015 now addresses supply chain management more effectively.

With manufacturing, the results are tangible: you can see the quality of the products – good, bad, inadequate and poor. And, because manufacturing tends to be done in the hundreds or thousands of units, poor quality can affect massive batches, costing the company enormous sums of money.

ISO 9001 certification

Interestingly, I have recently found that customers are putting more emphasis on quality over price, which is why ISO 9001 certification is now a vital tool.

Compliance to ISO 9001:2015 can be tricky, though, especially for beginners and organisations looking to implement it for the first time. First, there is the Standard to sift through; secondly, the documentation to research, create and manage; and thirdly, there are the processes that need to be rolled out throughout the organisation. It’s a big project, but the ISO 9001 documentation part of the project doesn’t have to be as cumbersome as it sounds.

As well as 72 pre-written documents developed by ISO 9001 experts (including all the mandatory documents), the toolkit contains three different project tools (ISO 9001:2015 Gap Analysis Tool; ISO 9001:2008 to ISO 9001:2015 Gap Analysis Tool; and ISO 9001:2008 to ISO 9001:2015 Conversion Tool), a requirements map for your project and a documentation dashboard to track the progress of your QMS.